Why Corporate Social Responsibility Doesn’t Work

Christine Bader, whose job at BP was to “assess and mitigate the social and human rights risks to communities living near major BP projects,” was not able to help prevent the Deepwater Horizon disaster or the 2005 BP refinery explosion in Texas City. This despite doing important work for a company that seemed committed to social responsibility. In her quest to figure out why good corporate intentions don’t prevent tragedies, Bader uncovered six themes that get in the way of making progress. Among them: People lie. No one gets rewarded for disasters averted. Customers won’t pay more. And no one really knows what corporate responsibility actually is. Bader points out that we all have a role to play in making things better: The general public must “recognize the real costs of safety and sustainability,” and companies have to “bear witness to their impacts, improve internal communication, reduce incentives to lie, and reward prevention.”

Guess what? Running a start-up isn’t the booze-soaked, foosball-fueled Silicon Valley dreamscape some would have you imagine. This measured, deeply reported piece by Gideon Lewis-Kraus tracks two entrepreneurs (disclosure: I went to high school with one of them) as they work feverishly to save their young company. Or, to put it more bluntly, “They had a month to raise $1 million or they would no longer be able to make payroll.” Lewis-Kraus is with these founders as they attempt to make this happen. He also spends time in a hacker house with fresh SV recruits; he paid “$1,250 for a mattress on the floor, behind a panel of imbricated torn shower curtains, in an unheated rabbit warren of 20 bunk beds under a low converted-warehouse ceiling.” It’s an important look into what it’s really like to try and “kill it” in a world that “is not a place where one is invited to show frailty or despondence.”

Why, exactly, is the CEO of your company embarking on that daring capital expenditure that’s got analysts shaking their heads? Is it all about a unique vision of the company’s potential? Or something more personal? If the chief executive is unmarried, maybe he (or she) is just trying to attract a mate. Nikolai Roussanov of Wharton and Pavel G. Savor of Temple found that firms led by single CEOs engage in much more aggressive investment behavior, in terms of capex, innovation activity, R&D, and acquisitions, than companies led by married chief executives. The potential for an increase in personal wealth may be a factor – “single individuals are clearly competing for potential mates with other single individuals,” and socioeconomic status is a major attractor. It’s also possible that single CEOs are generally less risk averse because they don’t have families to worry about. The same kinds of dynamics probably play out among lower-level managers too, Roussanov says in this Wharton video. -Andy O’Connell

Ever wonder why “life hacking” is such a thing, why people get so excited about little ideas for how to be happier and more productive at work? Ideas such as tracking your sleep habits with motion-sensing apps and calculating your perfect personal bedtime? Nikil Saval writes on Pacific Standard that life hacking’s popularity says something about How We Live Today – it wouldn’t be popular if it didn’t “tap into something deeply corroded about the way work has, without much resistance, managed to invade every corner of our lives.” What life hackers don’t realize, he says, is that there’s something dehumanizing about life hacking itself. It turns every aspect of daily existence into a task to be managed: “Rather than putting people in greater control of their lives, it puts them into the service of a stratum of faceless managers, in the form of apps, self-administered charts tracking the minutiae of eating habits and sleep cycles, and the books and buzzwords of gurus.” What we’ve really done is internalize Frederick Winslow Taylor’s century-old concept of scientific management for factory workers. We have become our own productivity police. -Andy O’Connell

I would be remiss if I didn’t include this feature by Joshua Green on HBR’s hometown heroes. Yet the things that made the Red Sox so memorable on their path to World Series victory – “their team chemistry, their beards, and the emotional bond they forged with the city in the wake of the marathon bombing” – were in fact the last things on owner John Henry’s mind when orchestrating the team. “It was the ability to ignore sentiment that paved the way for their success,” Green writes. He explores Henry’s methodical and mathematical talent strategy, which relies on impermanence (few long-term contracts for team veterans); young, cheap talent (“it’s not expensive players, but inexpensive ones, who are becoming baseball’s prized commodity”); and players who can just plain get on base. If you’re game for a read that combines all of this, plus commodities futures trading and the phrase “he looked like the Angel of Death,” look no further.